Adventures with lightweight and minimalist software for Linux

multimail: A rubberstamp endorsement

Looking back over the past week, I didn’t do as badly as I expected, considering my schedule. By calculations I owe a post each for Monday and Wednesday, so I’ll start with multimail.

There were two hurdles to the Debian version of multimail. The first is that, in a measure of infinite wisdom, the executable that is included in the Debian version is not called multimail, but is instead just mm. I lost 10 minutes this morning thinking the Debian package was just a bunch of configuration files.😡

The second impediment, and then one I couldn’t clear myself, was to get mail packets in a format that multimail could swallow, and if the home page is any guidance, I was looking for any of about four different formats.

It may be possible to finagle something from Google in one of those formats, but all my attempts were left with garbled text or just general incompatibility. Of course, I do also have a track record for scrambling things before they ever get going.

In any case, I was running out of time on my multimail adventure, and attempts to glean help from the Internet ran dry when I realized there were dozens of unrelated projects named “multimail” out there, and were severely obscuring my quest.

So I’ll leave it to you to judge it on its actual usefulness; my intuition suggests it may be helpful to have a tool that will retrieve your e-mail from Google, if you also rely on GMail, and then step into multimail.

But that is a project for another day. For now I’m willing to give multimail a tentative gold star on just about every other point of evaluation: Full screen approach, keypress clues in plain sight, popup menus at every corner, gorgeous use of color (with drop shadows!😀 ), extensive customizability and a decidedly friendly approach to mail reading.⭐ And if you get it hooked into your GMail account, tell me how it worked. I’d like to try.😉